Entitled, lazy, narcissistic and addicted to social media. Those are just some of the common complaints about millennials by their older colleagues, but are millennials really that bad, or just misunderstood? And, fair or not, how can they overcome the negative stereotypes when trying to get a job or get ahead?

“A lot of studies show that they (millennials) are not really that different from generations before in what they want for their lives—they just have a different background,” said Andrew Challenger, a vice president at Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

But that background may give older colleagues—Gen Xers in particular—reason to worry.

Born in the 1980s and 1990s, millennials grew up in the digital age, and became fast adapters of social media and smartphones. Many older millennials entered the job market during the downturn that followed the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, and younger millennials came of age during the Great Recession.

Challenger notes that the tough job market forced many to be more aggressive in their efforts to land a job out of college, and their command of technology made them a threat to older workers who were less familiar with it.

“Millennials are hungrier and more well-educated than any generation in history, and they understand technology,” said Challenger. “They are knocking at the door of people sitting in comfy positions and that’s where the negativity comes from—a real place of insecurity.”

Another reason Generation X feels nervous? Millennials represent a much bigger group, and one that will be the majority in the workforce soon as more enter the job market and more baby boomers reach retirement age. By 2020, an estimated 46 percent of all U.S. workers will be millennials, said consultant Lindsey Pollak, author of “Becoming the Boss: New Rules for the Next Generation of Leaders.”

Still, Pollak said many of the negative labels attached to these young workers are a result of misperceptions. The laziness label, for example, may simply be a reflection of millennials’ comfort level with technology. Having grown up with Google and GPS-enabled smartphones, they’re used to finding the answers with just a few clicks.

“Laziness, I think, is actually the ability to have all the information in the world at your fingertips, so you’re going to take the quickest, easiest route,” said Pollak. It’s not that millennials don’t want to work hard, “they just want to know why they are in their role and what the larger goal is,” said Pollak, a Gen Xer who helps companies train, manage and market to the millennial generation.

“They grew up with this instant gratification that the older generations didn’t grow up with,” added career expert Vicki Salemi for Monster.com. “The workplace is shifting to technology in general and this happens to be the generation where it changes. I think overall, for many people in the workplace the communication is changing.”

About Adam Henderson

Adam Henderson is prominent writer, speaker and consultant on the Millennial workforce and the Changing World of Work. His articles have been read by over 1 million people, has done a TED talk titled ‘Rethinking Work for the Modern World‘ and works with businesses to help them bridge the gap between their current ways of working and the needs of their growing modern workforce and new world of work

What is the Millennial Mindset?

The Millennial Mindset represents a new way of thinking about work and is not confined to just an age group. Millennials are simply early adopters of a new way of working, which is now starting to spread across other generations, giving rise to the Modern Employee. This is increasing the pressure on traditional businesses to fundamentally change their ways of working so they do not become irrelevant in the New World of Work.